Retirement Party

electric cars: junk science?

Question:

> It’s debatable whether it’s more expensive > than nuclear.  But the lower externalized costs to society for wind power > seem to offset this nicely.

Waste repository & decommissioning costs are tacked onto nuclear in Canada & the US. Wind generation has few such costs, because they’re often ignored. From wind energy advocate Paul Gipe, who doesn’t blind himself to externalized costs of wind power.  From http://www.chelseagreen.com/Wind/articles/Removal.htm "Thus, the costs to remove the 1,200 MW of first generation turbines still standing in California could exceed $100 million. WindStats looks at what  it will cost, what is entailed, and who will pay." "The excesses found in California–the huge gullies gouged into Tehachapi’s hillsides, the derelict turbines, the oil pouring down the towers, the glaring road cuts in erodible soils, the piles of industrial detritus, the massive jumble of machines scattered willy-nilly across the landscape–will all come back to haunt the wind industry in the years to come unless it learns to clean up after itself. " Paul Gipe, Time to Clean Up the Mess in Kern County  http://www.chelseagreen.com/Wind/articles/Cleanup.htm Karl Johanson

Response:

> Nuclear’s getting financing for new capacity as well. Dozens of new nuclear > plants are being built. The latest 2 to go on line in China

No wonder we haven’t seen any of those 50 new plants, they’re in China! I predict many tragic extension cord accidents, so you should get to work on some statistics. Wayne

Response:

>How much governmental > subsidies/guarentees did the investments have in either case.

I think it’s more important to ask what *can* be built now and in the future. If you can’t get a particular type of plant to the application stage even, then who cares what it used to cost, might have cost, should have cost, etc.? If you want to talk about how this or that could be done "if only…..", then you might as well carry that thinking to its logical conclusion – we wouldn’t need any new plants if only we didn’t need any additional plants.  :-) Wayne

Response:

> Nuclear’s getting financing for new capacity as well. Dozens of new > nuclear > plants are being built. The latest 2 to go on line in China > No wonder we haven’t seen any of those 50 new plants, they’re in China! > I predict many tragic extension cord accidents, so you should get to > work on some statistics.

Wayne, you said you’d never read any of my posts ever again. How can I trust you now? Karl Johanson It’s 2003 & some people still haven’t figured out that the internet is international. Rather than educating them, perhaps these people should be thought of as a resource to make money from. The poker potential alone is astounding.

Response:

> > Yes, nuclear sucks. However, coal sucks much more. Wind is diffuse, > expensive, unreliable, and with extensive subsidies, impractical. In a > world with anti-nuclear nuts, nuclear is expensive because 90% of the > construction costs can be attributed to lawyers. In a world without > anti-nuclear nuts, nuclear would beat almost everyone on price. > And if pigs had wings they could fly. So what? The fact is that you > *can* get financing for wind. So new capacity is being built. Here’s a

Ah, but how much, and with what subsidies and governmental promises? > two year old article about nuke’s future. At the time it was written, > heady renewkables probably scoffed. So where are the 50 fast tracked > applications? In the bin with the fuel cells perhaps.  :-)

Here’s a challenge. For the US, what is the investment over the last 5 years in nuclear power, including plant upgrades. How does it compare to the total investment in wind. How much governmental subsidies/guarentees did the investments have in either case. Now, who’s has more investment? I bet in total investment, you’ll find that its about par, with perhaps nuclear having an edge. However, I bet that you’ll find that of unguarentee’d investment, nuclear has a signifigant edge. Just my gut feeling, so it could be easily wrong. Prove it. Also, do the same analysis, except including the whole world. Scott

Response:

> Yes, nuclear sucks. However, coal sucks much more. Wind is diffuse, > expensive, unreliable, and with extensive subsidies, impractical. In a > world with anti-nuclear nuts, nuclear is expensive because 90% of the > construction costs can be attributed to lawyers. In a world without > anti-nuclear nuts, nuclear would beat almost everyone on price. > And if pigs had wings they could fly. So what?

And if wind wasn’t diffuse & intermittent, then wind energy might be a significant player, instead of a ‘woulda, shoulda coulda’ source. >The fact is that you *can* get financing for wind. So new capacity is being

built. Nuclear’s getting financing for new capacity as well. Dozens of new nuclear plants are being built. The latest 2 to go on line in China produce about twice as much power as all the windmills in the US combined, & will likely last more than twice as long as 21st century design wind generators. In the US many plants are getting financing to add new capacity by upgrading and improving efficiency. The improvements in efficiency in the US’s nuclear plants in the last few years (without building a new plant) add up to more power than all the wind generators in the world combined. Some CANDUs are undergoing upgrades & efficiency boosts & are coming back on line. Nuclear’s moving ahead quickly. Wind is like the driver who just crossed the starting line (in spite of a head start of decades) and claims they’re in the lead because they just doubled their speed (from 1 Km/h to 2 Km/h). Meanwhile nuclear has lapped it several hundred times. Nature of the beast. Wind is diffuse & intermittent. Karl Johanson Think about what the world would be like if all the anti-nukes in the world had put their money where their mouth is (like wmbjk did) and put their effort into actually building wind generators instead of into protesting nuclear energy. Why, wind generation might actually produce a whole 1% of the world’s electricity by now.

Response:

- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text ->    fossil fuel: 71% >    hydro: 7% >    other: 2% (2000) > That’s why I said "about" and "maybe".  One sees different figures for > many of these things. I think the DOE estimates US hydro could probably > be expanded to cover another couple percent of US usage without building > any new dams at all by just upgrading existing generators. >    nuclear: 20% >     [CIA world factbook] > I also add that one of the two diablo canyon reactors produces twice > the energy than all 13000 wind turbines in california, COMBINED. > So?

So; wind is a trivial energy source (in spite of the modern designs, in spite of higher ‘per watt hour’ subsidies than nuclear and in spite of it benefiting from such things as military research on propeller design). Plus the capacity factors of US wind generators average out to around 23%, making the above comparison even more slanted. The 21st century wind turbines only last around 20 years, compared to better than twice that for many nuclear plants designed in the early 1970s. This isn’t even accounting for the effective losses in the load following shuffle needed to account for the intermittent nature of this energy source. Wind turbines are cool. They’re very useful for some off grid uses, especially. Don’t expect them to be a significant player for grid power any time soon though. Invest now if you want though. It’s hard enough to afford the legal battles against protestors & multiple reregulation when you’re building a 1,000 megawatt 90% capacity factor nuclear plant. Imagine affording it for a 50 meg, 23% capacity factor plant (a plant which you have no control over when it makes the power). Protesting wind energy sites is a growing phenomenon, although you don’t see me among them. Karl Johanson

Response:

> Yes, nuclear sucks. However, coal sucks much more. Wind is diffuse, > expensive, unreliable, and with extensive subsidies, impractical. In a > world with anti-nuclear nuts, nuclear is expensive because 90% of the > construction costs can be attributed to lawyers. In a world without > anti-nuclear nuts, nuclear would beat almost everyone on price.

And if pigs had wings they could fly. So what? The fact is that you *can* get financing for wind. So new capacity is being built. Here’s a two year old article about nuke’s future. At the time it was written, heady renewkables probably scoffed. So where are the 50 fast tracked applications? In the bin with the fuel cells perhaps.  :-) http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2001/jun/02/511901163.htm l Wayne

Response:

says… > Yup. But the flaw was that you didn’t apply this discount to estimate > generation from the worldwide installec capacity numbers you > gave. When you do apply it; what did I get, worldwide wind generation > at about 2.8x Diablo Canyon.

I guess I just keep waiting for the punch line.  What does the installed wind generator capacity of the world versus Diablo Canyon have to do with anything?  Just actually say what you think it means instead of incessantly making comparisons.  You seem to be trying to suggest that because nuclear is producing more energy than wind that it is prima facie superior and/or to be preferred in any application or situation.  If this is what you’re trying to say then I doubt you can defend it.   But I don’t want to put words in your mouth or anything .   > The stuff is clearly very cheap from "overall pollution" and "total > fuel usage" aspects, but clearly expensive in terms of capital > costs.  Wind is cheaper in capital costs (< $1/watt, not sure about > exact costs), and is nearing the price of large gas plants ($.50/watt) > Installed Watt, or actual Watt (IE, corrected for the 20% > utilization.) > Also, is that including or excluding the cost of roads and power lines > to link them to the grid. A nuclear plant generating 1GW in a > centralized location is likely to need less copper than 2500 2MW > capacity turbines. (2500 2MW turbines is 5GW of installed capacity, > discounted for utilization, we’ll get a mean of only 1GW)

Well it depends on the location to be sure, but allocating excess generation capacity and pricing materials is all part of fixed cost per watt which is budgeted for in a given project.          It’s certainly possible that one could save on construction materials in a small, centralized nuclear plant as opposed to some other technology like wind farms.  However, I think the reality is that nuclear plants often have to be monolithic in order to be cost effective.  If you tried to build a nuclear power plant to only generate 100 MW for a small community then the cost of the facilities and manpower would be exorbitant.  OTOH, you could stick up several hundred 1 MW turbines and get this level of power relatively less expensively.  You also might end up taking less total land out of production, since in fact the towers have a tiny footprint.   You might even get some dual use out of a few of these towers as radio/cell repeaters, help insure the local environment was less polluted and use a potentially abundant resource which was otherwise being wasted.   > Also, need > to account for beefing up the grid to ship power around from where the > wind is blowing to where it isn’t.

Sure and one needs to account of adding to the grid so nuclear plants can deliver larger amounts of power and so they can service new areas.   > >That price was artificially inflated, deliberately, by the harassment > >and tresspass of the ‘protestors’, *then* that 12x inflated price is > >used as an argument for why nuclear power is too expensive. > >Its not. > Except, of course, if one were to build a new plant today, one > might suffer the same kinds of "actions and court cases".  (Indeed, > Of course.   > And next year, another billion tons of coal will be burned for > electricity.

And apologists for the coal industry, just like apologists for the nuclear industry have reams of scientific reports showing that coal plant emissions are not dangerous to anybody or anything.  There a book you might be interested in called _Toxic Sludge is Good for You_.   > Yes, nuclear sucks. However, coal sucks much more. Wind is diffuse, > expensive

After all is said and done it is still a little bit more expensive than certain fossil fuel options.  It’s debatable whether it’s more expensive than nuclear.  But the lower externalized costs to society for wind power seem to offset this nicely.   >, unreliable,

Fortunately, not all power needs to be available instantly and upon demand.  We should be looking at using wind energy for non-peak applications.  That’s all part of using wind energy realistically.     > and with extensive subsidies, impractical.

Farmers receive huge subsidies in this country.  Is farming also impractical then?  The subsidies to the wind industry are not nearly as large as to farmers by a long shot and I don’t see how the presence of subsidies in itself causes the industry to be impractical.  They are there to make sure the fledgling industry is not abandoned due to economic shortsightedness and conducting business as usual with fossil fuels.   > In a > world with anti-nuclear nuts, nuclear is expensive because 90% of the > construction costs can be attributed to lawyers.

Not hardly.  You’re generalizing from one case like diablo canyon.  The fact is that the nuclear industry has been spectacularly mismanaged from almost the very beginning and was overrunning on costs even when the public was highly enthusiastic about "the peaceful atom".   > In a world without > anti-nuclear nuts, nuclear would beat almost everyone on price.

No, but that could be a world that was just as bad, if the cheap price of power were subsidized by constant, usually unreported, safety mishaps and contamination problems which threatened the health of our citizens.  A prudent and third alternative would be to have a citizenry that was not overly paranoid, but recognized that real dangers do exist and need to be properly handled, even if it means having to spend more precious money or have more icky government oversight.  BTW, if the industry didn’t take the polar opposite extreme to the activists then they would probably be a lot more trusted by the public at large and nuclear power would be more widespread.  The nuke industry did one of the most monumentally bad jobs of PR in history and all they can do is sit around and whine about the fallout [pun not intended literally].   > Interestingly, one of the ways they can and do make money is by > selling wind-turbine output as "premium grade" energy.  For instance, > If customers are willing to pay, more power to the producers. Of > course, I think the customers are silly, but thats me.

That’s because nobody "owns" the air, so people don’t usually worry about it until it’s too late and their cities are choked with smog.  A 1 MW wind turbine produces 2-3 GW hours of pollution free power in one year’s time.  They can and do make a contribution to keeping our environment clean and reducing our dependence on fossil/fissile sources.   > >Wind power would require the further capital costs for storage > >plants to turn that unreliable elecricity into reliable electricity. > >Thats really hard to quanitify—depending on the daily and seasonal > >distribution of wind—but probably involves hydroelectric pumped > >storage. > Because wind power is still such a small percentage of overall > energy supplies, its variability simply disappears into existing > load variability today.  That situation will not persist: > Yup. However, that does become a relevant cost to Wind when it does > become major.

Of course.  But storage or backup capacity is something that we need to have anyway.  If nothing else, then the present nuclear resources we have could provide the back up capacity that we might need.   – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> but if you are correct here: > >That’ll take about a 160x growth in this country before its an issue. > Yup.. Wind is about 1.2% or 1/80′th of california’s generation > (2000). California is about 1/12 of the US’s generation. > Thus *california* wind is about 1/1000 of US consumption. (I don’t have > any immediate numbers for non-california wind). Thus wind would have > to grow to 200 times the current generation in CA to equal 20% of the > US consumption. > http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html > http://www.energy.ca.gov/wind/overview.html > My prior reference of 160 was an estimate. > it will be a while before it does become a problem. > Yup.

That won’t stop some people from freaking out prematurely.   —       Quibbler (quibbler247atyahoo.com) "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Response:

> >I was partially in error; I did not realize that these figures were 8 >years out of date. > That was the main thing I wanted to emphasize — the situation has > changed drastically in the last eight years, because of per-kWh > costs.

That number, that California is 30% of worldwide wind is 8 years obsolete. THe other numbers, about total wind generation in california and Diablo Canyon are are 2000 and 2001. It is still true that Diablo Canyon accounts for five times more wind energy than all the wind turbines in california combined. >… at least in the case of California in 1994, actual *production* >was about 25% of installed *capacity*. > This is pretty typical of wind-power installations.  The windiest

Yup. But the flaw was that you didn’t apply this discount to estimate generation from the worldwide installec capacity numbers you gave. When you do apply it; what did I get, worldwide wind generation at about 2.8x Diablo Canyon. > The stuff is clearly very cheap from "overall pollution" and "total > fuel usage" aspects, but clearly expensive in terms of capital > costs.  Wind is cheaper in capital costs (< $1/watt, not sure about > exact costs), and is nearing the price of large gas plants ($.50/watt)

Installed Watt, or actual Watt (IE, corrected for the 20% utilization.) Also, is that including or excluding the cost of roads and power lines to link them to the grid. A nuclear plant generating 1GW in a centralized location is likely to need less copper than 2500 2MW capacity turbines. (2500 2MW turbines is 5GW of installed capacity, discounted for utilization, we’ll get a mean of only 1GW) Also, need to account for beefing up the grid to ship power around from where the wind is blowing to where it isn’t. >That price was artificially inflated, deliberately, by the harassment >and tresspass of the ‘protestors’, *then* that 12x inflated price is >used as an argument for why nuclear power is too expensive. >Its not. > Except, of course, if one were to build a new plant today, one > might suffer the same kinds of "actions and court cases".  (Indeed,

Of course.   And next year, another billion tons of coal will be burned for electricity. Yes, nuclear sucks. However, coal sucks much more. Wind is diffuse, expensive, unreliable, and with extensive subsidies, impractical. In a world with anti-nuclear nuts, nuclear is expensive because 90% of the construction costs can be attributed to lawyers. In a world without anti-nuclear nuts, nuclear would beat almost everyone on price. > Interestingly, one of the ways they can and do make money is by > selling wind-turbine output as "premium grade" energy.  For instance,

If customers are willing to pay, more power to the producers. Of course, I think the customers are silly, but thats me. >Wind power would require the further capital costs for storage >plants to turn that unreliable elecricity into reliable electricity. >Thats really hard to quanitify—depending on the daily and seasonal >distribution of wind—but probably involves hydroelectric pumped >storage. > Because wind power is still such a small percentage of overall > energy supplies, its variability simply disappears into existing > load variability today.  That situation will not persist:

Yup. However, that does become a relevant cost to Wind when it does become major. > but if you are correct here: >That’ll take about a 160x growth in this country before its an issue.

Yup.. Wind is about 1.2% or 1/80′th of california’s generation (2000). California is about 1/12 of the US’s generation. Thus *california* wind is about 1/1000 of US consumption. (I don’t have any immediate numbers for non-california wind). Thus wind would have to grow to 200 times the current generation in CA to equal 20% of the US consumption. http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html http://www.energy.ca.gov/wind/overview.html My prior reference of 160 was an estimate. > it will be a while before it does become a problem.

Yup. Scott

Response:

>I was partially in error; I did not realize that these figures were 8 >years out of date.

That was the main thing I wanted to emphasize — the situation has changed drastically in the last eight years, because of per-kWh costs. >… at least in the case of California in 1994, actual *production* >was about 25% of installed *capacity*.

This is pretty typical of wind-power installations.  The windiest sites are used, but even then, the turbines only put out full power part of the time, and put out no power at all part of the time. This intermittency is predicted to become a major problem if windpower were to make up 20% of actual generation (10% fluctuations are not so bad; we get those in load today; we might need to have "generation-following load" instead of, or in addition to, today’s "load-following generation" to account for wind intermittency). >Got a reference for [foreign nuke-plant costs]?

Alas, no.  It is just something I read somewhere, marked in my head as "suspicious but better than nothing at all". The stuff is clearly very cheap from "overall pollution" and "total fuel usage" aspects, but clearly expensive in terms of capital costs.  Wind is cheaper in capital costs (< $1/watt, not sure about exact costs), and is nearing the price of large gas plants ($.50/watt) today; coal is in the middle at anywhere from $.70 to $1+ / watt; and PV is around $5–7/watt installed, today. >Keep in mind stuff like this: >    http://www.ecn.cz/temelin/diablo.htm [...] >Especially the last line: >    Thanks to the actions and court cases, its construction took >    **10 years to finish which made it 12 times more expensive.** >That price was artificially inflated, deliberately, by the harassment >and tresspass of the ‘protestors’, *then* that 12x inflated price is >used as an argument for why nuclear power is too expensive. >Its not.

Except, of course, if one were to build a new plant today, one might suffer the same kinds of "actions and court cases".  (Indeed, *every* plant one builds today suffers such things, in part because each merchant generator wants to block the next guy from building a plant that will compete with his.  The intervenors lists for the various new plant projects in California invariably consist primarily of other power companies.) As I said: >… these numbers were raised enormously by construction delays >and high interest rates … >And the above.

"Construction delays" includes the legal aspect.  It is hard to build something when the lawyers keep serving you with paper forbidding you to build it. The interest rates make the delays much more significant, due to the way power plants are financed: step 1, borrow the money; step 2, construct; step 3, begin operation and use the proceeds from sales to pay for everything.  If step 2 takes 10 years at 10%/yr, an initial borrowing of $100 million turns into $220 million owed. If the bonds being used to pay off the $220 million have to be refinanced at 16% over the next five years (I remember collecting 16% on my money market funds — those were the days!), the cost pretty much doubles again. >Perhaps. But one must also keep in mind how to deal with the >unreliability of wind. Unreliable elecricity has a *signifigantly >reduced value* compared to reliable electricity.  I have no idea how >reduced. but to me at least, it has essentially no value.

The value is pretty much "what the market will bear", in the wonderful new world of deregulation.  As a generator, you can get paid for delivering energy, or you can get paid for being a standby reserve.  If you own a wind plant, and do not deliver energy when you have contracted to do so, you will be hit with a penalty — but you can always buy the energy from another plant (typically a peaker) somewhere.  The fact that private companies are building wind plants in Texas, which has its own deregulation in progress now, indicates that those companies believe they will make money. (They might not believe that if it were not for tax credits and — I think — accelerated depreciation on windpower; at least as of a year or two ago, the numbers were cutting it pretty close.) Interestingly, one of the ways they can and do make money is by selling wind-turbine output as "premium grade" energy.  For instance, Utah Power will sell me 100 kWh blocks of "blue sky" program power for "regular cost + $1.95", i.e., an extra 1.95 cents per kWh. Just last month this was +$2.95 — they have lowered the price recently, perhaps due to additional supply coming on the market (Wyoming has a bunch of new wind installations that should be on line by now). >Wind power would require the further capital costs for storage >plants to turn that unreliable elecricity into reliable electricity. >Thats really hard to quanitify—depending on the daily and seasonal >distribution of wind—but probably involves hydroelectric pumped >storage.

Because wind power is still such a small percentage of overall energy supplies, its variability simply disappears into existing load variability today.  That situation will not persist: > Indeed.  Perhaps we really *should* start worrying about what > happens when wind power (with its variability) produces 20% of our > grid usage.

but if you are correct here: >That’ll take about a 160x growth in this country before its an issue.

it will be a while before it does become a problem. — In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Wind River Systems (BSD engineering) Salt Lake City, UT, USA (40

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